The position of defending one’s honor creates a shuttered attitude against one’s fellow men. Persons strongly centered on that motif—those eminently fanatical about their “honor”—are therefore hard in their general attitude towards others. They are, so to speak, always on the qui vive, always on the lookout for insults to their dignity. In the ordinary sort of person who, though not a saint, is not thus abnormally anxious about his honor, the reaction of becoming hard and sealed up only appears after he has actually been defied or insulted.

The meek man, then, is distinguished by the fact that he does not know this gesture of hardening his soul but remains, even in the face of an enemy, in the position of that soft, unguarded openness which is love’s mode of appearance. In his soul, the sensitive region of honor is blotted out. So also are other sensitive regions that foster some variety of the attitude of fierce resistance to an attacker; the region of specific sensitivity about one’s rights, for instance.

Meekness does not close off the soul, as does sulking

There are also, however, attitudes in which we remain soft and which nevertheless are surpassed by the man endowed with true meekness, Certain people react to offenses or insults, to unjust or contemptuous treatment and so forth, by the attitude of passive ill temper described as sulking. As distinct from the combative rebound of irritation, sulking is not an irascible mood of the soul. The sulker does not stiffen into a fighting position; he lapses into a specific egocentric variety of softness. The overdelicate, squeamish sort of people seize every opportunity to feel hurt and to brood over the offense suffered.

What exactly is sulking! It is a peculiar way of withdrawing into ourselves, very frequently associated with tears of commiseration for our own unhappy self. With a lump in our throat, we take a sort of mournful delight in imagining how the person who has wronged us would feel at this moment if he heard that we had met with a disaster.

We are itching, not to avenge the insult we have suffered by retaliating in kind, but to punish its author by shaming him. We wish so to arrange and manifest the consequences of his conduct (perhaps by inveigling him into a new set of circumstances in some way analogous to the former situation), so that his guilt, or at any rate his selfishness, callousness or whatever fault we attribute to him, will appear in a glaring light. We derive an unhealthy joy from representing to ourselves the chagrin and contrition of the guilty one as he becomes aware of what he has forfeited by his act of inconsiderateness, or as he sees us in a condition that reveals the gravity of his offense.